Second, it's been a busy news week in and around our obscure little town.  A jet crashed into a house located across the street from the end of the runway at the local airport, about a mile and a half from our house.  The house is a burned-out hulk, the path of the plane evident from the wind shield crumpled on one side and the twisted chain-link fence.  There was also a homicide in town, a woman stabbed to death in an apartment, allegedly by an acquaintance.

Such cases are still rare in Conway, a town that just cracked 50,000 in the past couple of years.  If the city keeps growing, there will undoubtedly be more accidental deaths, more murders, more tragedy for the papers.  We like our slow-paced, friendly Arkansas life; in my work, I like that parents tend to feel that their children are more secure going to college here than they would be in Fayetteville or Little Rock.  But all of that is part illusion, and we've always known it -- a trick of statistics.  It's rare (and to my mind, completely inexplicable) that a university would resort to a cover-up to keep its crime report attractive to its constituents, or to buy time to respond to a tragedy.  If we keep growing, though, it's inevitable that my university (and my town, and my department) will have to deal with a growing perception of danger along with the population explosion.